What Is White Hat SEO?

Date First Published: 1st January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Examples Of White Hat SEO Techniques
Importance Of White Hat SEO

Learn more about what white hat SEO is in this article.

White hat SEO refers to a range of ethical techniques that abide by the search engine guidelines and involve no deception. It generally refers to creating content for users rather than solely for search engines. The content is then made easily accessible by spider algorithms rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. It is the opposite of black hat SEO, which refers to a range of short-term and unethical techniques used to improve search engine rankings in a way that violates the search engine guidelines or involves deception.

Examples Of White Hat SEO Techniques

Examples of white hat SEO techniques include:

Providing high-quality and relevant content without stuffed keywords.
Providing unique and relevant titles and meta descriptions.
Offering a fast loading time and making webpages mobile-friendly.
Building backlinks naturally.
Improving site navigation.
Optimising the page for relevant keywords.
Appropriately using schema markup.

Importance Of White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is important because engaging in black hat SEO practices will cause a site to be lowered or deindexed in SERPs. Getting a Google penalty or being deindexed will result in a big drop in website traffic and after receiving a Google penalty, it can take a while to be relisted on the Google search results page. Google is a very powerful source of traffic for a website as it is visited by billions of people per day and without being listed on the Google search results page, the chances of more visits are greatly decreased. Therefore, it is recommended to only engage in white SEO techniques.

In addition, white hat SEO techniques are much more likely to stay effective in the future, so using white hat SEO techniques can allow websites to continue to benefit in the future, unlike black hat SEO techniques that may temporarily work, but in the future, search engines may become more aware of the black hat techniques and release updates to deindex or drop the rankings of sites that use those unethical techniques to rank higher.